Dimitar Bechev

 is Europe’s Futures Fellow 2020-21 as well as Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is the author of Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe (Yale, 2017) and co-editor of Russia Rising: Putin’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomsbury, 2021). His forthcoming book Turkey under Erdoğan is published by Yale in 2022.  Dimitar holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford.

Articles

Cover for: The grey zone between war and peace

Russia and Turkey have moved from confrontation to cooperation. But their shared interests have had deleterious consequences for the Kurds in Syria and Crimean Tatars in Ukraine. Tensions continue in Nagorno-Karabakh and Libya. And their support for right-wing authoritarianism in the Western Balkans is undermining liberal democratic values.

As the Bulgarian post-communist transition faces its moment of crisis and the government resigns, the political class and the economic model it oversaw are the subject of deep dissatisfaction. Dimitar Bechev outlines what went wrong, and what can be expected of Bulgaria’s spring of anger.